Frequently, applications for obtaining information about systems are implemented using clients and servers. For example, the systems may be a networking systems, power supplies, a system that communicates with disk drives, etc. An application may use the information about the systems to report the status of the systems to people who read the reports. For example in this case, the storage capacity of a disk drive may be low and a report may be made of this condition. The application may even take actions based on the information to correct problems occurring on the systems. For example in this case, if the storage capacity of a disk drive is low, actions may be taken to move data from one disk drive to another disk drive.